Welcome to Curious Business

Every Friday, I post a small insight into running Curio City and/or Blue Hills Editorial Services. My most recent posts are directly below. You can also start with the first post, or use the subject labels to the right to home in on particular topics. Feel free to comment on anything that interests you.

Friday, August 14, 2015

Christmas in August

It's time to
knuckle down; an LED Peace Sign Tree
Topper
sale this week kicked off Christmas already. I used to do a lot of business
with that item's vendor -- so much, in fact, that my account got horribly
bollixed up one year after they double-shipped one order that contained billing
and picking errors. When the dust finally settled I had a free carton of 24
tree toppers. Ordinarily I'm honest to a fault, but reopening their reconciliation
process was too painful a thought to entertain. Now I'm down to my last 14,
which will almost surely sell out in the next few months. They stopped making
tree toppers a couple of years ago and I'm going to miss it after selling 100
of them altogether.

That
vendor keeps selling more and more of their stuff in assortment prepacks, which
means I can't reorder the specific variant (color, size, etc) that people are
buying without also buying the ones that they aren't. It's no big deal to bricks-and-mortar stores, where shoppers can only see what's in front of
them. Online shoppers, however, can see
the out-of-stock variants because I have to display them all together. Since this vendor openly disdains online retail, I disdain most of their products.

Meanwhile,
it's the annual tax-free weekend for Massholes again. Sales tax is a small
nuisance for Curio City so this policy doesn't help me in the slightest; if anything, it drives a few potential customers into bricks and mortar.

The
Commonwealth will lose $25 million as shoppers mob stores to save a whopping 6.25% on crap
that they already intended to buy anyway. But everyone likes to stick it to the
taxman and it gives retailers another ginned-up "holiday" to market. There's no question that it produces heavy traffic, and I'll
confess that I'll be doing my part; every year Anne and I save a few bucks on
something that we needed anyway. This year we need to replace the dehumidifier
that died a few weeks ago. Curio City's warehouse (i.e., my dank, unfinished cellar)
will be noticeably drier for it. In fact, Curio City would pay for it if my cash flow were positive...which is isn't, alas.